Water Archives · George and Maia Ballis interview

Title

eng George and Maia Ballis interview

Description

eng George Ballis is the former director of National Land for People (and professional photographer covering Cesar Chavez) that sued the Westlands Water District of compliance with the 160-acre limitation in Reclamation law.

Creator

eng Ballis, George and Maia Ballis

eng Holyoke, Thomas

Relation

eng Water Archive Oral Histories

Coverage

eng George and Maia Ballis residence

Date

eng 3/1/2010

Format

eng Microsoft Word 2003 document, 30 pages

Identifier

eng SCMS_waoh_00019

extracted text

>> Tom Holyoke: Okay. We're here with Maia Ballis and George Elfie Ballis.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Exactly.
>> Tom Holyoke: And, although most of this will be about National Land for
People. Beyond that, we'd like to know a good deal more about the both of you,
particularly let's start with some early origins. Where are you from, what your
backgrounds are, and then how you got into National Land for People or how you
came about to create National Land for People.
>> George Elfie Ballis: So what do we do?
>> Tom Holyoke: Uh, where are you from?
>> George Elfie Ballis: In the beginning.
>> George Elfie Ballis: I was born in the cheese capital of Wisconsin, Kaukauna.
>> Tom Holyoke: Kaukauna, okay.
>> George Elfie Ballis: In my grandmother's living room, August 12th, 1925.
>> Tom Holyoke: Okay and how did you come out?
>> George Elfie Ballis: How did I get here?
>> Tom Holyoke: Schooling, coming out here, sort of your early life, from a
snapshot of your early life.
>> George Elfie Ballis: A snapshot of my life. I was a star quarterback in high
school, team captain and all that. Swear to God, 1943. I got a football
scholarship to the University of Minnesota and I went up and signed up and got
my room at the Firehouse and all that. Not any big money like these years. And
then I went down the street in downtown Minneapolis and I sat on a corner. I
said I don't think I want to play football. I want to be a Marine, 1943. So I
joined the Marine Corps and that's how I got my education. Best education I got.
It was the second most important decision of my life. The first decision was
marrying the love of my life, Maia.
>> Tom Holyoke: 1943 as a Marine. Did you see combat?
>> George Elfie Ballis: I fought the war with a screwdriver. [ Laughter ] See,
I'm alive today because I'm hot on high math. So during the boot camp, everybody
takes a test, right? So I scored off the chart on math and so instead of going
to the infantry, I went to radar school. And within my first lesson of the war,
is that within six months, half the guys I was in boot camp with were dead,
because they hit all these islands in the Pacific, right? Bang, bang, bang. And
I was really sad and later on after I got out four or five years, three years
later actually, I got angry because I realized that those islands in the Pacific
were taken one by one for PR reasons, not for military reasons.
>> Tom Holyoke: Really?
>> George Elfie Ballis: There was no necessity to take those islands after the
Battle of Midway in December, in January of '42, when the U.S. destroyed the
Japanese navy and controlled the Pacific there after but you had to keep the war

heated up at home, right? And to get the people up heated up and keep them rrr,
rrr, rrr, angry for fighting, you kill a few of the boys.
>> Tom Holyoke: Wow. What kind of impact did it have on sort of your world
outlook, political philosophy or ->> George Elfie Ballis: Well, that was one of the things, the worst but I
learned a whole lot of other things in the three years I was in the Marine
Corps. And I learned that war is not only silly and dumb, it's horror. And it's
not a way to solve problems at all.
>> Tom Holyoke: Okay. And after the war, did you return to Wisconsin?
>> George Elfie Ballis: No, I was born in Wisconsin but I was brought up in
Minnesota and I went back to Minnesota. So I got the GI Bill, so I went to the
University of Minnesota. And without thinking, I just put myself in that
engineering mode and I signed up for engineering in the engineering school. And
the first quarter, I got an A in everything, chemistry, high math, physics, it
was a walk away. Except for one thing, I got a C in English but after that first
quarter, all the war came back to me and it wasn't until then that I realized
chhhhh and I said I can't do this. I'm very smart. I can be a high-class
engineer, right? Make a lot of money, be a semi-famous person. But one thing
would be lacking, I would not have control over the work I did. It would be
controlled by the same old guys who killed my buddies in the Pacific.
>> Tom Holyoke: If you went to work for a corporation?
>> George Elfie Ballis: No, I went to, I left the engineering school,
>> Maia Ballis: No, no, no. If you went to work for a corporation,
>> George Elfie Ballis: Oh, If I went to work for a corporation, yeah, it would
be, but the kind of work that I would do, electrical engineering and stuff, I'd
end up with some war contractor, right, making tons of money and killing people.
And I said I can't do this. So I skipped out of the engineering school and went
over to liberal arts as they say.
>> Tom Holyoke: [ Laughter ]
>> George Elfie Ballis: So a couple of few years later, I got a double major in
journalism and political science. But it was, you should see my, what do they
call it? The resume or grades over the four years?
>> Tom Holyoke: Transcript.
>> George Elfie Ballis: You should see mine. It's awful. I got A's in a couple
of courses I really liked. I got a lot of incompletes and a few F's because I
just did whatever I thought was necessary to do. I got most of my education out
on the street. I was a college radical with my buddy Tom Kelly before there were
college radicals.
>> Tom Holyoke: So what did you do as a college radical? What was a college
radical at the time?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Well, I was, first thing I decided, I said, you know,
what these guys are doing with the world is a lot of bunk. So I just kept going
around to all the political organizations on the campus and, you know, trying to

figure things out. So I went to the Communist Party meeting, one meeting and I
thought oh, my God, these people are so boring, even if they're right, I don't
want to live in their world. So I never went back. So I got together with my
friend Tom Kelly and we organized a chapter of the United World Federalists
which said hey, the way we're going to have peace in the world is if we have one
government, so there's nobody to fight each other, right, except if we have a
Civil War. But that's a better chance at peace. And so, I spent a lot of time on
that and,
>> Tom Holyoke: If I may, the United World Federalists was an organization
promoting a one world government?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Right.
>> Tom Holyoke: Okay. Did you have a particular impression then about the United
Nations?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Well, yeah, it was nice but it didn't have any power,
and still doesn't have any power. So, the individual countries don't want it to
have any power. Obviously, they want to do whatever the hell they want to do
which is not good.
>> Tom Holyoke: What was your opinion at the time of the Cold War or the Red
Scare or whatever you want to call it in the 1950's?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Well it was another thing to keep people in fear, to
keep us in fear. And it worked. We got, we had, our military budget kept getting
bigger and bigger and the Russian military budget kept getting bigger and bigger
and it was like, this is dumb. You know, I don't even have a college degree and
I can figure out this is dumb. And the smart educated people are running the
world and what are they doing with it? They're screwing it up again.
>> Tom Holyoke: So after you finished college at the University of Minnesota,
where did you end up at? What did you do?
>> George Elfie Ballis: I went to Chicago with my first wife. It was one of the
great errors of my life, but anyway I went to Chicago and I tried to get a job,
a newspaper job, right, so I could learn a trade, blah, blah, blah, blah. I
couldn't find a job so I went to work at various factories. I worked in the
Kraft cheese factory. I worked in a steel mill; you know what I'm talking about?
I eventually got a newspaper job. And I worked at the city news bureau and my
first, as a reporter and the first job assignment I had was the midnight shift
and my shift was the morgue. And that was another education because I had to go
out and identify the bodies, which is not the most pleasant, right? And then I
got a job as an assistant editor of a string of community weeklies. And my job,
it was a desk job so I just had to sit there, and, you know, lay the thing out
and take photographs that people brought in. I finally said oh, God, the
photographs of course were crap. They were just awful, you know. Line Grandma up
against the front door, click, that kind of thing. And finally I said to myself,
I can do better than that. So I went down to a camera store and I bought a
camera and a book and I started shooting pictures. The first roll of film I shot
was at an ethnic market in the west side of Chicago and it's sort of like the
Cherry Street auction in Fresno. Oh, people are selling those and I'm
photographing these people, you know. Click, click, click, and it was love at
first click. I said wow, this is it. This is what I want to do and so I started
photographing.

>> Tom Holyoke: And how long did you continue to, did you continue to do that
for these weeklies or did you become a freelance journalist?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Well, I did pictures for our newspapers but I mainly
explored the people on the street, kind of thing and which is what I really
liked to do. I still like to do it, right, as I get in contact with people.
>> Tom Holyoke: What did you learn about them?
>> George Elfie Ballis: What did I learn about people?
>> Tom Holyoke: On the street?
>> George Elfie Ballis: On the street. What I learned about on the street, is a
new skill I developed back then, it's an old skill now, right, is that I can
look in the mirror and I see everybody.
>> Tom Holyoke: Okay.
>> George Elfie Ballis: We are us. There is no them. There's only us. And no
matter what color or religion, race, age, it makes no difference, to me.
>> Maia Ballis: And what did that allow you to do?
>> George Elfie Ballis: That allowed me to connect with people when I
photographed them, like that picture in the back. And people sensed, people
sensed how you are, what you are. You don't have to say anything, right? I mean
if you're a blue-eyed devil and act that way, people will understand that. If
they realize that you are one of them and you are with them, it changes the
whole situation. And it's not a conversation, you know, I'm your friend, I'm
really your friend. [ Laughter ] You just do it. And if you do it with this
energy from your heart, people will receive that energy, regardless of their
education or language. I could go to places where I don't even know the
language, it doesn't make any difference.
>> Tom Holyoke: Did you find that people liked having their picture taken?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't.
>> Tom Holyoke: Okay.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Especially if it's people on, who are oppressing the
people I'm really working with right, they don't. Like in the grape strike, I
did a lot of photography with the Farm Workers Union, and the bosses or the
representatives of the bosses or the cops knew I was one of them and they were
not quite friendly.
>> Maia Ballis: And the other place was the slaughterhouse, right?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Oh, the slaughterhouse.
>> Tom Holyoke: The slaughterhouse?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Oh, that's right, yeah. The only, I did pictures of a
lot of people at their work. The only people who objected to having their
picture taken of their work were the slaughterhouse workers in Denver. They did

not want their picture taken. Everybody else was proud, the watchmaker, you
know. Hey, I'll show you how to do this, duh, duh, duh, kind of thing.
>> Tom Holyoke: And what did that tell you? People in slaughterhouses did not,
did not want to be photographed, didn't really want to be recorded doing this.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Right.
>> Tom Holyoke: What did that tell you? What did that teach you?
>> George Elfie Ballis: [ Laughter ]
>> Tom Holyoke: What's the message from that?
>> George Elfie Ballis: The message from that is they had a job and they were
doing it because they felt forced to do it and they did not like that work. And
maybe that's a thing we shouldn't be doing. If this work people can't stand,
there must be something wrong with that work.
>> Tom Holyoke: So how long, how long did you continue to remain in the Chicago
area?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Oh, only for two and a half years. We decided it was the
city of the black snow because in the wintertime when it snowed, ah, it was all
white for about two days. And then the snow was black so we left.
>> Tom Holyoke: Where to?
>> George Elfie Ballis: California.
>> Tom Holyoke: Okay.
>> George Elfie Ballis: It was sort of an accident. We were going to go to
California for a couple of weeks. We got to San Francisco and we ran out of
money and the car collapsed. So we stayed in San Francisco and I got a factory
job there too because I couldn't get a journalism job. Then I got a job as a
wire editor on the Wall Street Journal in San Francisco. Wow, what a joke.
Anyway, my job was they were printing a West Coast edition of the Wall Street
Journal but they, all the work was done in New York and they'd wire it over and
the wire editor's job, my job was to correct the spelling and make paragraphs
and do subheads. Wow, subheads. You could do a lot with subheads, right? So I
started playing around with the subheads, you know. And eventually, the editor,
the San Francisco editor called me over to his house and said doo, doo, doo,
lecturing me, if I wanted a career at the Wall Street Journal, blah, blah, blah.
So I read the Chronicle and there was an ad for a labor editor in Fresno and I
answered the ad and got the job.
>> Tom Holyoke: And that's how you came out to live in this area?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Yeah. I came here in January of 1953. When Eisenhower
went to the White House, I came to Fresno. The first editorial I wrote was goodbye to Harry Truman.
[ Laughter ]
>> Tom Holyoke: And what was Fresno and the Valley like in 1953?

>> George Elfie Ballis: Hot.
>> Tom Holyoke: Hot, still hot.
[ Laughter ]
>> George Elfie Ballis: Well, it doesn't bother me as much, but that first
summer, holy momma, whooh, hot and dry. But hot and dry is better than hot and
wet so I hung out. I didn't come here planning to stay forever. But some things
happened anyway. Two things happened. One, in those days, '53 in January, its
winter. You can see the peaks of the Sierras. You can't do that much anymore,
but you could see it and I said hmm, I got to explore that. So the next summer,
I got a couple of maps and I got myself together and looked at, let's crawl up a
small mountain. So I went on a hike by myself and I couldn't get to the top of
where I wanted to go. I said whoa, here I am, 27, I can't even climb a small
mountain. That's pretty bad. So I quit coffee and cigarettes, cold turkey, the
next day. I dreamed about cigarettes for about five years. [ Laughter ] I'd be
sleeping in, I'd wake up because I was dreaming I was in a bar drinking scotch
and smoking. [ Laughter ] But that went away after awhile. But then I got into
hiking alone in the Sierras and it was just awesome to be in that great silence
of Big Momma, except for the damn airplanes that were flying over, right?
Otherwise, it was pristine. And then I also quickly became aware of the two
important political problems in California. One is farm labor and the other is
water. And so I started involving myself in both of those issues. I started
driving around the Valley with my cameras and photographing farm workers, right?
It was like ->> Tom Holyoke: We're still in the mid-1950's at this point?
>> George Elfie Ballis: The mid-1950's yeah, right after I came to Fresno, '53,
'54, '55. And I was, I weighed about 40 pounds more than I now weigh and I had a
crew cut. But I considered myself a radical, right? But I was going to go out
and help those farm workers and I started photographing them like this, you
know. I'm the upper class, helping these poor folks. That quickly went away,
quickly. They became my friends, some of my friends to this day and it was a
whole, a whole different thing. I'm photographing like this and even like this
sometimes. And my job is not to help these people but to help us, to understand
that together is the only way we can make the world a better place. And the, oh,
what about, so then I started studying the water issue and I wrote editorials in
the paper and blah, blah, blah. I managed a, I was the office manager for a guy
named Sisk who was running for Congress in 1954.
>> Tom Holyoke: Let me just interrupt. At this time, you're writing editorials
in?
>> Maia Ballis: The Valley Labor Citizen.
>> George Elfie Ballis: The Valley Labor Citizen in which I was in. So I'm
writing editorials but what the hell? What do these big landowners want, kind of
thing.
>> Maia Ballis: Because the big landowners were donating money to Sisk's
campaign.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Well, this guy Sisk was not supposed to win. He was
what, an Okie kind of guy, an uneducated Okie. He couldn't even speak. He
couldn't even make a speech and I talked to him once and he said well, they

talked me into running because it's good for the tire business. And he was
selling tires, tractor tires and all other types, right? So it looked like he
was just, he was a stand-in candidate, right? The Republican incumbent, a guy
named Oakley Hunter was going to win. But Oakley Hunter was one of those
condescending bastards, right, you know? He looked down on everybody. People got
mad at him. And then it looked like our boy was going to win. And so I noticed
that coming into the campaign was a lot of money from the big landowners on the
West Side. And so I said, hmm, so election's over. Sisk wins. I write an
editorial saying what do these guys want?
>> Maia Ballis: Right.
>> George Elfie Ballis: They don't want what we want in the labor unions, what
do they want? About a week later, I got a whole package of stuff from a guy
named Paul Taylor at Berkeley and he says, in effect, he said son, I'll tell you
what they want. And what they wanted was water, and blah, blah, blah, so I got
all this information from Paul Taylor.
>> Maia Ballis: So Paul Taylor is Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley who was Mr.
Water and married to Dorothea Lange and he's the one who facilitated her taking
documentary photographs. So George ended up doing a seminar with Dorothea,
didn't know they were connected and, well you should tell the story. Yeah, it's
a great story.
>> George Elfie Ballis: So I'm photographing and I never went to photography
school. But there was an article in this paper, I think it was the Chronicle but
anyway, about this woman named Dorothea Lange and I knew who she was. She
photographed the Okies in the '30s. And she's going to have a, do a seminar on
the philosophy of photography and I said oh, that might be interesting. It was,
I don't know, 12 Saturdays in a row. So I had to go to San Francisco to the Art
Institute. And I went to the first class and she looks at me and says do you
know Paul Taylor? And I said yep. She said he's my husband. And thereafter,
every Saturday, after the seminar was over nine to 12, we'd go out and have
lunch together and then we'd argue, the three of us would argue about whether
we're going to talk about photography or water. [ Laughter ] But it was a great
education.
>> Tom Holyoke: Actually before we jump further into the water issue and now
Congressman Sisk, you'd said you also had a chance to go out and do, take a lot
of pictures of the people back in the '50s and the '60s who were striking over
farm worker conditions, the grape strikes down in Delano. You had a chance to be
involved with some of that?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Yeah.
>> Tom Holyoke: Would you kind of talk a little bit about that, what you saw and
kind of what they wanted and sort of the conditions they lived in and worked in?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Well, the farm workers labor issue ->> Tom Holyoke: Yes.
>> George Elfie Ballis: -- is every issue and every issue that you get involved
in is the same issue. And the issue is respect. Women's rights issue is respect.
Civil rights, respect. Farm workers, respect. Death penalty, abolition of death
penalty, respect. So it was very easy for me when Maia and I got together in the
late '60s, for us to work on all these various issues because we viewed them as

the same issue. It's not like ah, are you working on this or are you working on
that? We're working on everything because everything is one thing, like
everybody is one person.
>> Maia Ballis: And how did you get involved with the farm workers?
>> George Elfie Ballis: I drove to Delano.
>> Maia Ballis: You drove to Delano because?
>> George Elfie Ballis: That was the right thing to do.
>> Maia Ballis: You were a labor editor at the time.
>> George Elfie Ballis: I was a labor editor at the time.
>> Maia Ballis: And you were more pro-labor.
>> George Elfie Ballis: I was more pro-labor than the guys I worked for.
>> Maia Ballis: Yeah, right.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Because, should I tell that story? I might as well tell
that story, too. Okay. So I was working at this Labor Citizen. At the behest of
seven people who represented, they were the board of control, who represented
the various local unions. And, you know, I criticized Jimmy Hoffa. I criticized
the racist building trades. You know I did, I had complete editorial control. I
could do anything I wanted. And,
>> Maia Ballis: Because you did, when they had an issue,
>> George Elfie Ballis: Oh, because when they had a strike, man, I did it to a
fare-thee-well like nobody had ever done it before and nobody had ever done it
since for them. And so, they were impressed. There was a certain group of guys
who were trying to get me fired on the board but they could never get four
votes. Several times, we'd meet once a month and several times they got three
votes, but they could never get four votes. So then I went to Delano and started
photographing the farm workers' strike in '65. And then there was a whole bunch
of uneasiness among the local labor union leaders including the guys who
supported me. They were saying what are you doing going to Delano, it’s 75 miles
away? I said what, you get down there in an hour. It's not like it's another
country. I'm not going to Costa Rica. But anyway, and finally I decided well, I
think I'm going to quit. So I found another job sort of and I went to a board of
control meeting. We met once a month and I told them that I was going to resign
in a month. I gave them a month's notice. And I got up to leave the room and
before I got to the door, the secretary of the labor council who had been my
supporter for 13 years I was on that paper, made a motion that here after, the
editorial policy of the labor union, the Labor Citizen, will be controlled by
the business manager. I said, my God this is the Wall Street Journal all over
again. But anyway, I walked out the door.
>> Tom Holyoke: Why do you think that situation came about? What happened?
>> George Elfie Ballis: What happened?
>> Maia Ballis: The heat.

>> George Elfie Ballis: Well, they, they weren't real labor people. Real labor
people understand that an injury to one is an injury to all. That was an oldtime slogan of the unions. So if somebody in another union is going on a strike,
I honor that strike and it's my strike because we're all in this together. But
they didn't, they didn’t have that vision.
>> Maia Ballis: They were pretty racist.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Well, some of them were very racist, right. One of the
things that I did when I was on the Labor Citizen, is I spent some time in
Mississippi with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in '63 and '64 as
a photographer and organizer. And they were uncomfortable with that. The fact is
there was a guy, a black guy who was a business agent in the labor union asking
me, calling me to task for going to Mississippi. I said choo, choo, choo, choo.
>> Maia Ballis: You should explain how you were able to do that.
>> Tom Holyoke: Yeah, I'd actually kind of like to hear that. I didn't know that
you had gone down to the civil rights movement too.
>> George Elfie Ballis: What?
>> Maia Ballis: Okay, explain how you didn't take, they didn't have money to pay
you ->> George Elfie Ballis: Oh, yeah, right, this is really crazy. So over the
years, this small paper, and they didn't want to give me a raise. So I kept
chiseling at the time. And I finally got them to the point where I had never had
to show up in the office. All I had to do was put out a paper every week and so
I got to be wow, I could do almost anything I wanted, right? And then I took my
vacations, I went to Mississippi, but. So I could so all these things, you know.
Go follow the farm workers around, listen to Paul Taylor and do agitating around
the water issue and stuff like that.
>> Tom Holyoke: How much time did you spend down in Mississippi with the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Probably a total of three months maybe.
>> Tom Holyoke: Okay.
>> George Elfie Ballis: In two visits, one in '63 and one in '64, in the summer
of '64.
>> Maia Ballis: And?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Huh?
>> Maia Ballis: You went with the Mississippi ->> George Elfie Ballis: Oh, yeah. One of my main jobs since I was a political
person in the eyes of SNIC and the guy I was working with who was my boss, Matt
Herron was, they sent me with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to the
Atlantic City 1964 Democratic National Convention, where I got another great
lesson. But anyway, in politics.

>> Tom Holyoke: Well, we wouldn't want to jump by that too fast. What was that
lesson?
[ Laughter ]
>> George Elfie Ballis: The lesson? Okay. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic
Party followed all the rules of the Democratic Party in selecting delegates. So
they had the caucuses and there were some white people in there. And the regular
Democrats, the so-called regular Democrat, the Mississippi Democrat, but they
did it the old way. No blacks, blah, blah. So two groups of delegates go to
Atlantic City. And I went with Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and what
happened is we got sold out by people who should be with us, Hubert Humphrey,
Walter Reuther, Martin Luther King. They all said oh, duh, duh, duh, you can
have three token delegates, but you can't have the delegation. So I said hmm.
That's another, another shoe, bong, drops.
>> Tom Holyoke: Effort on their part at political control?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Well who? They made -- Here's what, here's the
situation. 1964, right? Goldwater is going to be the Republican nominee. Lyndon
Johnson is the Democratic nominee. And he's a real operator right. And he wants
protection, because Goldwater is very conservative and if you screw up this
Democratic, Mississippi Democratic Party, you'll get Goldwater for President.
That's the fear. That really works, fear really works. If you would make people
afraid, poof, they're do any notorious outrage you ask them to do. Witness the
Iraq War. You've got the American population afraid and they're willing to send
their kids over there to get shot up and to shoot other people up for no good
reason but we're afraid. So he got the other delegates afraid. He got Martin
Luther King afraid, bah, bah, bah, and they all fell in line.
>> Tom Holyoke: Okay, before we get back to the water, any other little stories
from civil rights?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Tell him a story, would you?
>> Maia Ballis: I'm trying to think of ->> Tom Holyoke: Farm workers strike? Did you meet Cesar Chavez?
[ Laughter ]
>> George Elfie Ballis: Yeah, a few times.
>> Tom Holyoke: Is there a story?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Is there a story about Cesar?
>> Tom Holyoke: Just your reaction there makes me think you're less than
impressed.
>> Maia Ballis: Oh, honey. Tell him what your relationship was.
>> George Elfie Ballis: My relationship was, I went down there. Cesar didn't
know me from anybody, right, and so he started asking around, who's this blueeyed devil, right? And then it turned out, I passed muster from all the people
he consulted. So I was very close, closely involved. And then at one point,
what?

>> Maia Ballis: She's making a great big noise.
>> George Elfie Ballis: At one point,
>> Maia Ballis: Sit, sit, sit.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Cesar is sending people to boycott in Cincinnati and
Chicago, to do the boycott against Gallo, Schenley and the other grape growers.
So he called me in one day and he said he wants to send me to Cincinnati to run
the boycott and I refused. I said, I said, I said my job is research and
photography. My job is not to run the boycott in Cincinnati. And he didn't like
that, right? And later I learned that he didn't like it when anybody discussed
anything about the union. And so, he kept firing people and firing people and
firing people and firing people because they just didn't choo, choo, stand the
line. I said that's not very good. So one of the union, one of the reasons that
the union was so weak by the time he died is because he destroyed a lot of
people who were very active and very loyal to the farm worker movement, not to
him. This way that picture is important to me because it shows all these other
people. He's nothing without those other people. None of us are anything without
the other people we were,
>> Maia Ballis: The context, yeah.
>> George Elfie Ballis: In the context.
>> Tom Holyoke: You're referring to the picture that's behind you,
>> George Elfie Ballis: Yeah.
>> Tom Holyoke: That's on the camera?
>> Maia Ballis: Okay.
>> Tom Holyoke: Okay. Water, Bernie Sisk, wins, why? Why were West Side farmers
supporting Sisk?
>> Maia Ballis: Yeah. What did Paul Taylor tell you?
>> Tom Holyoke: What did you learn?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Well, okay, Sisk is in office and he's going for his
second term. And he called me into his office and said I want you to work on my
campaign again, all right?
>> Tom Holyoke: Again?
>> George Elfie Ballis: As office manager because I was office manager in '60
and '54 so he wanted me to be the office manager in '56. And I said I can't do
it. And I told him why; the big land owners want the federal government to give
them cheap water. At that time, it was, they were paying five dollars on 100
dollars worth of water. Five percent is a sweet deal right. That means it's
socialized agriculture on the west side because they couldn't farm without this
huge subsidy. So it's not economic and free enterprise and blah, blah, blah. So
I told him I couldn't do it and I told him why and he said you have to trust me.
And I said I can't trust you because you're not even going to be around when the
water project is finally delivered, so you can't be responsible. So I can't

trust you. It's got to be in the law. And so we parted company. That’s, that was
one of the times when three of the people on the board of control wanted to fire
me and couldn't. So he introduced a bill in Congress and it passed the House and
then it went to the Senate. In the meantime, we charted all the land ownership
on the West Side.
>> Maia Ballis: Who's we?
>> George Elfie Ballis: We, the Young Democrats actually. And a loose-knit
organization we called the Western Water Users Council, you know. It was a phony
radical front so to speak, three guys with a mimeograph machine. So anyway, we
got together and we produced these maps which showed, Jesus, they got these huge
land ownerships. And the Westlands Water District,
>> Maia Ballis: It's in the archives.
>> George Elfie Ballis: There's like, it's in the archives, right. There's this
map that shows, we put Southern Pacific Railroad in red square, 640 acres, one
mile by one mile. Each square is one mile. It's a checkerboard through the whole
district. They own 110,000 acres of land and so, the bill comes to the floor of
the Senate exempting the Westlands Water District from the federal reclamation
law which said you can't get more than 160 acres worth of water from the federal
government. You can own whatever you want but you can't get more than 160 acres
worth of water. And that was creak, thrown out.
>> Maia Ballis: Because?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Because Sisk was working for the big land owners, right?
[ Laughter ] Anyway, so that bill came to the floor of the Senate and me and
another 18-year-old Young Democrat went to Washington with 36 of these maps
which showed the ownership. And we went in to see a guy named Angus MacDonald
who worked for the National Farmers Union. He said my God, I didn't know that.
So he took us over to Wayne Morris, Senator Wayne Morris' office and Wayne
Morris said whoa. And then we went to see Paul Douglas, whoa. And then Paul
Douglas and Wayne Morris filibustered the bill when it got to the floor.
>> Tom Holyoke: If I may ask, what point in time are we at right now?
>> George Elfie Ballis: This is 1958.
>> Tom Holyoke: 1958, thank you.
>> George Elfie Ballis: So they filibustered the bill.
>> Tom Holyoke: Actually, sorry to interrupt again,
>> Maia Ballis: That's okay.
>> Tom Holyoke: Even in, so even in 1958, growers over on the West Side, what
was I think becoming at that point the Westlands Water District, were even then
trying to change reclamation law to change the acre limitations and the
residency requirements ->> George Elfie Ballis: Right.
>> Tom Holyoke: -- even at that point?

>> George Elfie Ballis: Yeah, that's the issue. That's the issue.
>> Tom Holyoke: It is the issue but even in '58, they're still trying to,
>> George Elfie Ballis: In '58, that's the issue.
>> Tom Holyoke: They're still trying to do it.
>> George Elfie Ballis: That's the issue in the bill.
>> Maia Ballis: But wasn't that their intent from the beginning?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Well, that was their intent from the beginning. That's
why they backed Sisk and blah, blah, blah. That's why Sisk was buddy-buddy with
them. So anyway, Morris and Douglas filibustered it for I don't know, three
days, I guess it was. And finally Lyndon Johnson was the Senate Majority Leader
and he got pissed off. He said screw this, you guys and he agreed to, he took it
out. He took the exemption out and the bill passed. And it was signed by
Eisenhower. And then in January of 1961, when JFK took office, he reinstated, he
administratively reinstalled the exemption. Another political lesson.
>> Maia Ballis: And why did he do that?
>> George Elfie Ballis: I don't know.
>> Maia Ballis: You have a clue about why he did that.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Why did he do it? You tell me.
>> Maia Ballis: Pat Brown.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Oh, yeah, Pat Brown. Pat Brown was the governor of
California, blah, blah, blah. So anyway, they made, he made this deal and that's
what he did.
>> Tom Holyoke: Was Pat Brown delivering votes in an election or,
>> George Elfie Ballis: Well, no, JFK was saving Pat Brown because he was going
to face an election, reelection, blah, blah, blah. It was like fear again. You
know, whoosh, look at the Boogeyman. Look at the Boogeyman. Everybody is going
to get you unless you give away the country. Give away the country. Send our
boys to get killed or whatever the issue is. It's fear. If you've got a
Boogeyman and people believe the Boogeyman, they'll do anything.
>> Maia Ballis: Make the deal.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Make the deal.
>> Tom Holyoke: So Kennedy actually reinstated the exemption for West Side
growers from the 160 acre limitation residency requirements?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Right, right.
>> Tom Holyoke: Is this in the same legislation that created the San Luis
Reservoir?

>> George Elfie Ballis: Yeah. That was the authorization bill for that
reservoir.
>> Tom Holyoke: Okay, so that, 1958 we have, at this point in time, we have the
creation of the San Luis Reservoir. It brings a tremendous amount of new water
over to the West Side, really allows the development of, I guess the Westlands
Water District we have today.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Well, no, you have to understand the Westlands Water,
they were filing before, but they were pumping so much water that their wells
had run dry. And they would have pumped themselves out of business if the
government hadn't rescued them. So that's what the San Luis project did and that
project also became part of the state water project which took water to LA, not
to LA, but to Southern California. LA didn't get any water because they have
plenty of water already. So there you are, 1961.
>> Tom Holyoke: Okay, so after this happens in 1961, where are you at and what
are you doing?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Well, I continued photographing. I became a part-time
organizer for the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, so I'm
photographing and organizing and blah, blah, blah.
>> Tom Holyoke: What is that?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Hmm?
>> Maia Ballis: AWOC?
>> George Elfie Ballis: AWOC was Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, predated the United Farm Workers Union. It was a committee set by the AFL-CIO which
was going to do, wanted to do something for farm workers so they set up this
committee and they sent out some organizers. And they did some good work but
they didn't have the too, too, too, together. And I worked with him and
continued photographing, continued editing the Labor Citizen. Then I became very
active in the Democratic Party and I was president of the Democratic, what was
it called, Fresno Democratic Association which is a local volunteer Democratic
organization for two years. And we would have these wild meetings and press
stuff like that. And it was the second largest Democratic club in California
when I was president.
>> Maia Ballis: Because?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Because I made, I made an organizing effort. I go to the
senior citizens village. I go to all the union meetings. I'd go to the veterans
meetings and everything and I'd get all these people to join this organization.
>> Tom Holyoke: So now for the remainder of the 1960's, were you involved in
water politics at all?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Yeah, oh yeah. We did some things in Washington; go to
Congressional hearings and stuff like that. Then the water started being
delivered, when was it, '64, '63, something like that and then I was heavily
involved also at the same time in the civil rights movement and other labor
organizing stuff and then the farm workers union and so forth. All this stuff
was all mixed together because it's the same issue.

>> Tom Holyoke: Okay. I guess ultimately what I want to get to is the creation
of National Land for People but I don't want to; I want to make sure I haven't
missed anything significant prior to that.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Well, yeah, in 1967, maybe it was '68, after I left the
Labor Citizen, I did some freelance work and I was working for Self-Help
Enterprises which is an organization out of Visalia which is helping people to
build their houses by they supply the labor which is their equity in the house,
right? So I'm producing booklets and flyers for them and blah, blah, blah. And
I'm on their payroll, not on their payroll, but a contractor, contractual
worker. One Saturday, I'm going out to photograph them building those houses in
Kingsburg and they're finishing the houses and there's a beautiful young woman
there. Later on, found out who was an interior decorator who's showing these
people, helping these people to pick colors, right? It's very difficult to pick
a color for a house from a little square like this, right? So they said oh, that
pink is beautiful and you paint the whole goddamned wall pink and it's like
whoa. So she's helping them out and I'm clicking away and taking pictures of
her, talking with her, and then when it's all over, the day is done, I get in my
car to drive away. I was driving a red Sprite at the time. She's driving a green
Sprite. It happens to be Maia driving the green Sprite. So I pulled up alongside
of her at the stop sign and said hey lady, do you want to drag?
>> Maia Ballis: I thought he was nuts.
[ Laughter ]
>> George Elfie Ballis: And she was right. But that was the beginning, 1967.
>> Maia Ballis: Yeah.
>> Tom Holyoke: Okay. So how do we get to ->> Maia Ballis: Okay, let's go. We'll switch gears and I'll do a little bit
about my background which is I was born in Connecticut in 1942 and my family
moved to California. So I was one of six children and raised in the Bay Area.
And my dad was an architect so I was going to work with him as an interior
designer. I was an art major and when my dad died and my first marriage was
falling apart thereafter, my first husband, Don Sorter [assumed spelling] was
from Tulare and had family down here. I'd been to the Valley and a search agent
came to the college. I was going to the College of Arts and Crafts and tried to
find someone in the design department who would come down and work for a store
down in Fresno. And I thought, well, I've been to Fresno. I need the money. I
was a single mom with a child by that time and I came down and within two months
of getting here, I ran into Lucy Norman at a folk dancing class and Lucy Norman
happened to work for Self-Help Housing and she said oh, you're a decorator. You
don't know how hard it is for me to try to explain to people that when you pick
the cute color here and you put it on the wall or the house, duh, duh, duh,
would you please come down? We got this new project and these families and duh,
duh, duh. So I went with Lucy and we went down to this little rural area and by
that time, I had, within two months of getting to Fresno and working for the,
oh, it was Healey and Popovich. I decided that it was not for me and I made a
connection with one of our clients who came in who was working for the Office of
Economic Opportunity. And trying to find some furniture for their offices
because they were starting an eight county migrant worker project and I thought
oh, well, that sounds interesting. And they needed an art department and the
director called me and asked me if I wanted to be involved. I said yes and so
very shortly thereafter, I had gone to this building development where people

were just finishing their homes and choosing their colors. And this guy was
taking pictures, click, click, click, what? [ Laughter ] This is really
distracting. And I said Lucy, who is that guy, after he ran into us or he
encountered us on the road as we were leaving. And she said oh, that's George
Ballis. He has this one really dirty picture of the ownership patterns of the
Valley that you just have to see. I said well, what do you mean? And then she
told me. Well, you won't believe it until you actually see these patterns and
she says it's really a great show and he does it out at Fresno State. Well, I
was dating a guy who was an aggie at Fresno State who was taking the class, the
extension class where George had his magic map. So I asked Andy if I could come
with him at,
[ Laughter ]
>> Tom Holyoke: Technical difficulties.
>> Maia Ballis: There was an extension class,
>> Eric West: Start that again. Let me stop the recording for a second. Get
comfortable, hold on.
>> Maia Ballis: Okay, okay. At Fresno State, was Ed Dutton in the economics
department or sociology?
>> George Elfie Ballis: They had some experimental college thing.
>> Maia Ballis: The experimental college, yeah. And he and Ed Dutton did a class
on the power structure of the Valley. And as part of the class, he had a slide
that showed the ownership patterns and I was the only one in the class who went
into shock because when I went to school, I thought all the robber barons were
in ancient history and there was small farms. I just thought California was all
small farms. What did I know? My mom had gone back to the farm during the
Depression and, you know, they had a family farm and it was a totally different
operation than what I was seeing, anyway.
>> Tom Holyoke: If I may,
>> Maia Ballis: Yeah.
>> Tom Holyoke: You were the only one who went into shock.
>> Maia Ballis: That went up and talked to him afterwards.
>> Tom Holyoke: That means that everybody else knew or nobody else cared?
>> Maia Ballis: It was a good, what kind of reactions were you getting in that
class?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Well, like you said, people were blasé, that's the way
it is, bah, bah, bah.
>> Maia Ballis: Yeah, well, anyway, I have a little social injustice trigger
that got flipped and so I talked to him afterwards for some reason and then
eventually, oh, what was it? Andy couldn't give me a ride and you gave me a ride
home? That was the beginning. And then he found out I was working for this
poverty project and came over with a chart that he wanted me to duplicate. And
when I saw that chart, I was also upset. So he got me twice. And then he was

working on a photography show. You were doing an exhibit and I came over and
helped him organize the photographs for the show. And we just started working
together. I was doing videography for the migrant project and he did some
shooting for me. We just collaborated and eventually over the years, within a
short period of time, we just got together. So in, yeah, that was 1967.
>> George Elfie Ballis: '68, '67, yeah.
>> Maia Ballis: Yeah.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Then we got officially married in '72.
>> Maia Ballis: Okay. [ Laughter ] Those were for tax purposes, who cared? I
mean, you know, our work was so integrated, our lives were so integrated. We did
photo projects. We did the Oakland book, the Pitt River Indian film. He started
moving from still photography to film. He did his first film was with Luis
Valdez, I Am Joaquin and, a very low budget production.
>> George Elfie Ballis: I hand cranked a 300 dollar camera.
>> Maia Ballis: But it became a film classic.
>> George Elfie Ballis: It always was.
>> Maia Ballis: Anyway, yeah, when he was doing photography, he sort of phased
out of organizing and then what happened, I had an accident. I got rear-ended
badly in Fresno and I went home to stay at my mother's house to recuperate up in
the Bay Area so then he came up to visit and developed, we did the Oakland book.
>> George Elfie Ballis: And film.
>> Maia Ballis: And film, so we worked together on those projects and at the
time, I was doing, I was a freelance graphic artist working out of my mom's
house and we kept collaborating but he would have to drive down, up and down and
then when he was doing films, from Hollywood to Fresno, to Oakland, to back.
Anyway, it got, that was hard for a couple of years. And then the Pitt River
Indian film and then what happened? It was, when we came back to Fresno,
>> George Elfie Ballis: No, we went to Santa Fe.
>> Maia Ballis: Oh, we went to Santa Fe. Did,
>> George Elfie Ballis: Douglas came in to.
>> Maia Ballis: With a Chicano community organization that had, they tried
taking leadership from different organizations and making those the board, the
governing board of a non-profit. So we wanted to examine how that would work,
the energetics of that. And then back to ->> George Elfie Ballis: Fresno.
>> Maia Ballis: Fresno.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Where we did The Richest Land.
>> Maia Ballis: The Richest Land. Okay, and then?

>> Tom Holyoke: The Richest Land, being another film production?
>> Maia Ballis: A film, uhm hm.
>> Tom Holyoke: Okay. The subject matter being,
>> Maia Ballis: Water, agriculture,
>> Tom Holyoke: Water, agriculture, more interest back on West Side agriculture?
>> Maia Ballis: Right, right.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Well, it was the glory and shame of California
agriculture was the subtitle.
>> Maia Ballis: It's right up there by the way.
>> Tom Holyoke: I saw it.
>> Maia Ballis: Okay. So then it heated up.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Was around '74, '75, it, it was, what happened was we
decided we had to go to court on the water issue.
>> Maia Ballis: Oh, before we go there, before we go there, because at that
time, we were working with alternative food system. There was a whole movement
to take food out of grocery stores and do direct farming, direct marketing from
the farm and then also more direct buying clubs so people would get together and
buy their food together and try to bring the price down. And we were organizing
in, no, no, that was it. We were still, that was after, that was after we
started doing the water project, you're right. Right. Okay, but there was some
other element that came in there. What did we do? Oh, yes, ah, the growing. I
mean he's, his first job was as corn pollinator.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Corn sexer.
[ Laughter ]
>> Maia Ballis: Okay. Anyway, your preference, not mine. Anyway, he came from an
agricultural environment, but we had a little place on Millbrook and there was
only a front yard and so we gardened in the front yard. And the neighbors called
us in and turned us in to the city for inappropriate yard material and the
neighbors were all upset because it was the best green grass in the neighborhood
and we turned it into vegetables. And so when the city contacted us, we said do
you really want to have a fight about this? And they said no. And so we got to
keep our garden and meanwhile, we were exploring organic gardening and going to
classes and doing all this sustainable agriculture research. Okay, so that was,
that was the roots of, I started herbology. I went to Emerald Valley and studied
with Rosemary Gladstar and there was this whole herbal renaissance going on. And
people were looking at more natural, medicinal plants, going back to, you know,
seeing, reevaluating old trends and seeing what worked, what didn't work. And we
were doing things like, well, we were doing heavy mulching at the time, right?
We followed the Ruth Stout method and then we found Fukuoka and the One Straw
Revolution where you integrate your crop rotations, control weeds so that you
use less water and not nutrients, okay, anyway. So we're just delving into all
this earthy material. And then what happened?

>> George Elfie Ballis: Then what happened is we decided we had to go to court
on the water issue. That was our only avenue left.
>> Maia Ballis: And what was the precipitating event? Wasn't it the sales
started happening and you did the charts?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Well, the sales started happening but they were
happening before. But anyway, they were happening and we decided that we had,
and so we had to have a formal organization.
>> Maia Ballis: Who's we?
>> Tom Holyoke: I think I'm missing something here.
>> Maia Ballis: Okay.
>> Tom Holyoke: Who's we, what are the sales and how all of a sudden are you now
jumping back over to do West Side issues?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Yeah, we're going back.
>> Maia Ballis: Okay, now who's we?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Who's we? We is Berge Bulbulian ->> Maia Ballis: Well, it's you and Berge.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Me and Berge and a few other guys.
>> Maia Ballis: Berge Bulbulian,
>> George Elfie Ballis: Jake.
>> Maia Ballis: [assumed spelling] Jake Kirahara, Magnusson.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Magnusson, right. But anyway,
>> Maia Ballis: And the orange grower.
>> George Elfie Ballis: We had to raise money and before that we had these loose
organizations, the Western Water Users Council, you know. We never had any dues
or money or anything but when somebody had to go to Washington, we'd say okay,
how much money do we need to go to Washington and we'd buy somebody a plane
ticket and they'd go. But this was serious stuff we thought. So we incorporated
and we talked to some foundation people and we got an entre and the way to raise
money with a foundation is you have to find an entre and then you can get a lot
of money. So we found this guy, Drummond Pike with a youth project and he funded
us. And the very interesting part of that was I'd go to his office in San
Francisco and he had a picture of me in the office as the oldest youth that they
ever gave money to.
[ Laughter ]
>> Maia Ballis: Young in heart.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Yeah, young in heart. Anyway, so we got money and we
took them to court and when did we go to court, '76?

>> Tom Holyoke: They being the Westlands Water District itself?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Well, no, we sued the Bureau of Reclamation for not
enforcing the law and asked them to establish policies to enforce the law. And
this was a great morality play so we didn't file it, the case in Fresno. We'd
get killed, right? So we filed it in the district court in D.C. and I remember
the day of the hearing. It was perfect. It was a morality play. So on our side
of the table here's Jessie de la Cruz, a farm worker, turned farmer, two
lawyers, Mary Louise Frampton and George Frampton and they are like 30-something
and they look so pure and innocent. And on the other side, there must be ten, at
least ten middle-age chubby lawyer types, right? And back of them is Jack
Harris, now deceased, tall guy in a white suit and I'm saying perfect. And in
back of our lawyers, is me, a black guy and who are those ->> Maia Ballis: Eddie Nolan.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Eddie Nolan, right. And it was a great morality play. So
in comes the judge, a one-legged black judge, whoa. I bet he came into the room
and said I know what's going on here. [ Laughter ] Anyway, he gave us a decision
in a week, against the Bureau. We won.
>> Tom Holyoke: And the goal of this by requiring reclamation to ->> George Elfie Ballis: To establish rules to enforce the 160 acre reclamation
agreement. That was the issue.
>> Tom Holyoke: For to effectively achieve what end?
>> George One hundred and sixty, to enforce the 160 acre limitation law.
>> Tom Holyoke: But ->> Maia Ballis: To ->> Tom Holyoke: Is the idea here then to require large landowners on the West
Side to break up their, to break up their farms, sell the property off?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Yeah, at a price which is not taking into consideration
the availability of the water. So the land is worthless without the water,
right? So anyway, we won but that was just the beginning. Then the large
landowners freaked out and they attacked Congress. And they hired a guy with
10,000 dollars a month, one of their lead guys. And then of course it was the
manager, the manager of the Westlands Water District,
>> Maia Ballis: [assumed spelling] Whiteart,
>> George Elfie Ballis: What was his name?
>> Maia Ballis: Whiteart, or Whitart.
>> George Elfie Ballis: No.
>> Maia Ballis: The manager?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Yeah. Aerosol Ralph.

>> Maia Ballis: Oh, Ralph, Ralph Brody.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Ralph Brody, right. And he would just lie so we got to
the point where hmm, so we started calling him Aerosol Ralph. And we put out
newsletters and press releases, and Aerosol Ralph and then we began attacking
him because he's a state socialist because,
>> Maia Ballis: Well, he is.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Blah, blah, blah, and then they don't know how to do
free enterprise. This is socialism, blah, blah, blah. And he demanded of the
Kiwanis Club that he answer our charges. So they held a meeting in which he was
the main speaker at one of their lodges and he got up and said I'm not now and
never have been a member of the Communist Party. [ Laughter ] It was hysterical.
I said this is beautiful. Anyway, then I appear on TV with Whitehurst, their
10,000 dollar a month guy and he had a little book, right, where he had answers
to all the questions. One of the first programs we were on was a radio program.
It was an hour and there was a reporter. He asked me a question and asked him a
question, right? So we started off. Mr. Ballis, blah, blah, blah, I forget the
question and it was a real complicated question but anyway, and I said, well,
that's too complicated a question to answer on a radio program. But I'll give
you my phone number and you can call us and we'll talk to you about that. And so
I gave him the number. And then he said Mr. Whitehurst, and Whitehurst said I
forgot my number. [ Laughter ] That was hysterical, right? Anyway, so then we
went through the hour and at the end, we had to sum up and I summed it up and
then it was Whitehurst's turn to finish the program and he said I remember my
number. And I said I knew he'd remember that number. [ Laughter ] So we had a
great time. And then we appeared on TV programs too. Like the only people
watching these talk shows are his people and our people, right? No ordinary
citizen is going to listen to a bunch of guys argue about water.
>> Maia Ballis: Especially in those days.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Especially in those days, right.
>> Tom Holyoke: These days at this point are the late 1970's?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Yeah, this is, yeah, '78, '79. So he had the answers to
all these questions written in a little book so I sort of dah, dah, dah. So one
day, we're on a, he and I are on together and I wait to the very last minute and
they're wondering where the hell is Ballis? God, he's not going to show up. And
like 30 seconds before the program starts I come in with all these documents.
And plunk them on the table in front of me and sit down and we start the
program. And he, they ask the, standard questions they're asking, right? They
ask a question and Whitehurst answers the question out of his little book which
is a total lie. And then it's my turn to answer and I pick up the appropriate
document and I said well, on page 1971 of blah, blah, of this document it says,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which was total contrary to what he had said. So
this went on. By the end of the half-hour, he's totally rattled, right? Then
another time, I figure out, we got to figure out a way each time to throw him
off, right? So this time I'm on with Whitehurst and an assistant ->> Maia Ballis: Department of Interior.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Assistant Director of the Department of Interior from
Washington. He comes on. And so I decided, hmm, so whenever Whitehurst answers a
question, just a lie, I laugh. So he's talking and you hear this voice in the

background which is me laughing and he's totally rattled. And the guy from the
Department of the Interior is so pissed off, at the end of the program he snaps
out of there. He says I'll never appear with that goddamned Ballis on TV again.
I said I hope so. [ Laughter ] But anyway, so we did those kinds of things.
Because it became obvious at that point that we're not going to win, right? So
we started to organize to build this place, to carry on the mission of we are
one, we are together. So that's what we did for the next, for the last three
years, we were going through the motions. Because they were, the liberals were
the Sierra Club, they were with us and then all of a sudden, this is not a
mountain. We can't deal with this. And then George Miller, the great liberal, at
one point, we had a hearing. This is 1980, I guess. Maybe it was '81, no it was
'80. Anyway, I'm a witness and I was on the witness stand. George Miller kept me
on the witness stand for about an hour and a half asking me all the leading
questions so I got to lay the whole damn thing out. The one and only time I got
to speak openly and freely to the Congress, okay? The next year, another
hearing, right? I appear, Miller's not there. Miller has made a deal to support
their bill in exchange for the chairmanship of the subcommittee. So he's not
there. So there's a bunch of Republicans, they start chewing on me.
>> Maia Ballis: Well, Chip Pashayan went around the bill ->> George Elfie Ballis: Well, wait a minute. He said, they started asking me
some questions ->> Maia Ballis: Oh, okay.
>> George Elfie Ballis: I said this is great. This is better than George Miller,
so I answered the questions because I had all the dope, right? And then, then it
was only about five minutes, I got maybe three questions answered. Then Chip
Pashayan who was a Republican Congressman from this area goes on the committee
and goes around to the guys saying don't ask that son of a bitch any more
questions. And all of a sudden, in five minutes, the hearing was over.
[ Laughter ]
>> Tom Holyoke: So Congressman Miller, you believe that he agreed to support, I
assume what became the '82 Reclamation Reform Act,
>> George Elfie Ballis: Right, he agreed to support that.
>> Tom Holyoke: In exchange for a subcommittee chairmanship.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Right. I figured that was the deal because suddenly he
was subcommittee chairman.
>> Maia Ballis: Right.
>> George Elfie Ballis: You know, I figured he made a deal, because why would he
change in 12 months? Because he's a great liberal, right?
>> Tom Holyoke: I want to backtrack on a couple items here. The Bureau of
Reclamation ultimately had been willing to enforce the 160 acre policy, the
residential requirement policy and actually force a lot of the land holders on
the West Side to start selling off land, were there buyers out there willing,
out there for it? Was there, was it an interest on the part of people to buy
this land?

>> George Elfie Ballis: Well, that was the problem, we thought. So we organized
a bunch of small farmers. I think what we had 500 on a petition at one point? So
we had 500 on a petition at one point so there was a hearing held by,
>> Maia Ballis: I can see,
>> George Elfie Ballis: One of Jerry Brown's assistants, the attorney general,
>> Maia Ballis: Oh, Tony Kline.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Tony Kline?
>> Maia Ballis: No, it was, oh, Hellbie [assumed spelling]. No, that was ->> George Elfie Ballis: The guy from New York.
>> Maia Ballis: That was Tony Kline but no, you're thinking of Nelson.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Huh?
>> Maia Ballis: You're thinking of Senator Nelson.
>> George Elfie Ballis: No, no, no, I'm thinking of Tony Kline. Anyway, his
attorney general was holding a hearing and so I go in with all these papers and
he says, he's saying do you actually think that anybody wants to live out there?
And I said well, we've got 500 names here. He says people would want to live out
there?
>> Maia Ballis: He's from New York City.
>> George Elfie Ballis: He’s from New York. He thought Sacramento was a burg,
right? Live in the country? You got to be kidding. So with that kind of
attitude, it was, we sort of got the message. It was like; another thing that
happened was we produced a slide show called Discover America, where we did all
these slides. And we'd go around and show the slide show, all of us and one time
I was in LA. There must have been 75 people in the crowd. I do the slide show
and then I'd always say the issue is not power to the people. We already have
the power. The issue is, are we going to accept the responsibility of our power,
because if we did, as a people, we could put Safeway out of business in two
months. They'd be gone. Some woman jumps up in the middle of the crowd and says
what am I going to do if you take my Safeway away from me? I said whoa, we're in
deep shit here.
>> Maia Ballis: We were trying to explain that such a small fraction of the food
prices that consumers pay actually goes to the farmer and why farms are
struggling, you know. People, urban folks just have no clue about what's
happening. They just go to the store and get their food and then they complain
when the prices go up but they have no sense of what's going on with the
underlying economics.
>> Tom Holyoke: But was there a vision here of transforming West Side farming
from large land holdings into a large series of small farms and farm
collectives?
>> Maia Ballis: Yeah.
>> George Elfie Ballis: We had a guy --

>> Maia Ballis: UCLA.
>> George Elfie Ballis: An economist, Ed Kirshner who did a study out of UCLA
showing what Westlands could be like if the law were enforced. It was beautiful.
>> Maia Ballis: Comparing the east side with the west side.
>> George Elfie Ballis: All that stuff.
>> Tom Holyoke: Let me ask that. I came across Mr. Kirshner's report actually
just a couple days ago preparing for this and spent,
>> George Elfie Ballis: Yeah, so we did all the steps. We also did, what we
would call and Maia started talking about that.
>> Maia Ballis: The spiral strategy.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Is we said, we have a circular strategy but then we
realized if you have a circular strategy, you end up at the same place you
started. So then we started calling it a spiral strategy.
>> Maia Ballis: A spiral spatter.
[ Laughter ]
>> George Elfie Ballis: And so we did farmer's markets. We did a consumer co-op
in Fresno. This was so beautiful. It was so beautiful. Four hundred families,
nobody was on the payroll. No by-laws, no officers and we ran that thing for
eight years with volunteer labor, it was just such a beautiful, we'd have tea
parties on Thursday. You know, people were doing all sorts of community stuff
for each other, with each other. And then we got jammed in the politics of big
landowners because at one hearing, one of the big landowners came in and said I
want you to go out and look at their store. Would you let your wife go in there
and buy food?
>> Maia Ballis: Well, we were doing what they were doing also in other places,
that now you can go to Whole Foods and they have bulk bins. Well, these were
larger bulk bins because we would buy food in bulk and the student population
membership was low income and really appreciated, but we had people from every
age group and it was a wonderful way for people to get together around healthy
food. So you had whole grains and you bag up your own grains and we had a scale.
The scale was the most expensive thing about the operation and, but other than
that, we bought everything in bulk. And it was sort of like the places now in
Fresno where you can buy cases of this and cases of that, however, this afforded
people access to food but more than that, you would feel very comfortable
chatting with people over well, what do you do with buckwheat growths? Well, I
do this and I do that and, you know, or how do you cook your split peas, and how
do you? It was a community and I guess what happened is the growers felt that it
was a community base that we were educating about food options that might be a
threat to them. So they got, we suspect that they got the landowner to kick us
out because they,
>> George Elfie Ballis: We got kicked out.
>> Maia Ballis: Yeah, and they didn't have another occupant for a long time. But
this was across from Fresno High so.

>> Tom Holyoke: And when you went to the big land holders out on the West Side
and offered to buy the land which supposedly they were supposed to be selling
off, what kind of a reaction did you get?
>> George Elfie Ballis: What?
>> Maia Ballis: Oh, no one, no one was able to do that.
>> Tom Holyoke: Okay. [inaudible]
>> Maia Ballis: That was not happening, no. Someone, did someone actually
approach Southern Pacific? I can't,
>> George Elfie Ballis: Oh, yeah. We did. That's how we established the case.
>> Maia Ballis: Oh, okay.
>> George Elfie Ballis: We tried to buy 160 acres from Southern Pacific that we
could sell and so that was the basis of that court case.
>> Tom Holyoke: What was their reason?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Huh?
>> Tom Holyoke: What was their reason? The law says 160 acres,
>> George Elfie Ballis: Their reason was they were holding it for,
>> Maia Ballis: Development.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Commercial, no, it wasn't commercial development. It was
city development, anyway. They didn't use the word city but that's what they
were saying.
>> Tom Holyoke: In the later 1970's, up in Washington, D.C., was there any
change in the political environment with the incoming of the Carter
administration? I always had some impression they were a little more skeptical
of ->> George Elfie Ballis: No.
>> Tom Holyoke: Okay.
>> George Elfie Ballis: No.
>> Tom Holyoke: Okay. I do have one, I don't know if it was the Carter
administration or somebody else who had convened, I guess what ultimately became
the San Luis Task Force and the report they put out which was, as I understand,
very critical of Westlands and very critical of the lack of enforcement on the
acreage limitations out there. It ultimately didn't come to much, but as far as
your impression; there was no real change in political attitude,
>> George Elfie Ballis: No.
>> Tom Holyoke: From Ford, Carter, and on to Reagan?

>> George Elfie Ballis: Nope.
>> Tom Holyoke: Okay. Okay, did you do a lot of work out in Washington, D.C. as
we get to the passage of the '82 Reclamation Reform Act or beyond company line
testifying before Congress?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Well, I spent a lot of time in Washington. In fact, we
had this lobbying army of eight, ten people. We had a long Dodge van and we put
a platform on that van and we'd drive non-stop to Washington and then stay there
for a week or two, ten of us. And we were politely rejected but we kept coming
back.
>> Tom Holyoke: Politely rejected by?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Everybody.
>> Tom Holyoke: Everybody.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Even our alleged friends like the Sierra Club.
>> Tom Holyoke: So even organizations like the Sierra Club, you couldn't entice
them into sort of taking on an issue?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Everybody got; the problem is that our society is
attached to the corporate tit and there was no way, like that woman in LA,
that's the position of America, you know. And so there's a little change, no,
but not very much. Because what do you do?
>> Tom Holyoke: So 1982, you have the passage of the Reclamation Reform Act. The
acreage limitation is about 640 acres now.
>> George Elfie Ballis: No, it's infinity.
>> Tom Holyoke: Is it infinity?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Yeah. They got a figure there but there's no residency
and they don't enforce it. So there's the Boston Ranch of 25,000 acres. It's
been that way for, since the '30s when the old man came out and put it together.
>> Maia Ballis: Talk about the charts.
>> George Elfie Ballis: What charts?
>> Maia Ballis: The research you did that showed, remember, what was the name of
that waitress who was, who owned land and didn't know it?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Yeah. Boy, there was a lot of people.
>> Maia Ballis: Yeah.
>> George Elfie Ballis: You know, they transferred titles to some people and
some of the people like, we'd go down to the, I'd go down to the county
recorder's office and get the latest sale. And I'd start calling the people up
and I called this waitress up. She said what? I own 160 acres? I didn't know
anything about that. I didn't put my name on that goddamned sheet, blah, blah,
blah. What? And this happened several times where I called people up. They
didn't even know they were landowners. And there were people who were deeded 160

acres who weren't even born at the time that they got the 160 acres. So the
whole thing is a fraud. It's like health care is now. I mean it's the same
insidious, obscene operation. The thing with the insurance companies is
unbelievable. How would we as a people even stand for anything like that, what
they're pulling? It's amazing but we're doing it and we're saying, oh geez. And
the President, Jesus. Obushma. I mean, you know? That health plan of his? Oh,
this is it or nothing. Well, I'll take nothing.
>> Maia Ballis: Okay, back to the ranch.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Back to the ranch.
[ Laughter ]
>> Tom Holyoke: Same thing but into the 1980's after we have the passage of the
'82 Act, did you stay in this line of advocacy or ->> George Elfie Ballis: No, we decided okay, we give up.
>> Maia Ballis: Let it go.
>> George Elfie Ballis: So we're going to do the rest of our spiral. We're going
to do solar energy. We're going to do organic growing. We're going to do us and
we're going to do it with multimedia. Like we quit doing media, I quit taking
any serious pictures in 1975 and never picked up a camera again until 1998.
>> Maia Ballis: Because we were consumed, when we moved our office out to a
little farm on the west side of Fresno, so we were working every day. We were
working in the fields. We were working in the office and some of our staff moved
in with us so we had a teepee there and a trailer there and we modified, turned
the double garage into an office space. So yeah, we had, and Mark was going up
to San Francisco delivering produce for the direct, there was a, we had a
producers' cooperative and we were also working with the consumers' cooperative.
So we were trying to do all these things all at once. It was intense. So there's
no time for media.
>> George Elfie Ballis: But it felt like the right thing to do.
>> Maia Ballis: Oh, yeah.
>> George Elfie Ballis: And then in, what happened in '98, was that my rich
brother-in-law gave me a high-end video camera. So we quit making film in '74.
>> Maia Ballis: It was expensive.
>> George Elfie Ballis: It was too expensive, 16 millimeter was too expensive.
We couldn't do it. So he gave me this, Bill White gave me this high-end camera
and it was almost like the Chicago street. It was like wow. [ Laughter ] I can
do this all right here. Before when we were doing 16 millimeter, I wanted to do
an effect, I got to write that down, mail it to Hollywood,
>> Maia Ballis: Mail it to Hollywood, pay the fees,
>> George Elfie Ballis: Three days later and 200 dollars later, I get this back
and I say oh shit, that's not what I wanted. But here, if that happens, oh,
delete. And we just start over, right?

[ Laughter ]
>> Maia Ballis: It's a different world.
>> George Elfie Ballis: It was a different world. The first video we made, we
got a statue for it by the way, was called Elfie's Eye: The Second Coming and it
was a, actually it was a love letter to Maia because she was out of town for
four months taking care of her dying mother, house, but it was like wow. And so
we've been doing it ever since. We've got a website now. We must have 3,500 or
4,000 pages on it including beginning in April 1998 up to yesterday.
>> Tom Holyoke: And so that's what Sun Mount is all about?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Uhm hm.
>> Tom Holyoke: Sun Mount?
>> Maia Ballis: Sun Mountain.
>> George Elfie Ballis: sunmountain.org. It's got an art gallery of Maia's
paintings. It's got,
>> Maia Ballis: Alternative technology that we've done, the gardening. It's,
>> George Elfie Ballis: Everything.
>> Maia Ballis: Yeah.
>> Tom Holyoke: How you ever thought about going back into the water politics?
In 1992, we have the Central Valley Project Improvement Act. George Miller was
trying to inject environmental concerns into reclamation law.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Well, I don't know. Let me answer that. A lot of people
are interested in solar energy now. Solar electricity, right? And solar
electricity is one of those things that invites decentralization, right? But
what we have now is we have Chevron and PG&E and the likes of them going into
the solar electric business. And so what they're going to do is they're going to
put square miles and square miles of solar panels, blah, blah, blah, blah, and
it's going to be the same economic structure. The issue at hand is that, one of
the big issues of respect is democracy and we don't have it. We don't have it
economically. We don't have it politically and when we get presented with a way
to decentralize it, we ought to decentralize it and democratize it. That's
what's beautiful about the Internet, is, you know, there's a lot of crazy, selfindulgent pornographic stuff on there but there's also a lot of other really
good material, you could not get any other way except on the Internet, or
something of the equivalent. And now people are talking about hey, we got to
close this down a little bit. Oh, these people are getting crazy. They're being
free.
>> Tom Holyoke: The same kind of Internet crackdown we see, we tend to see in
China, I suppose.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Oh, yeah. Well, China, yeah, right.
>> Tom Holyoke: Do you see that happening here?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Right.

>> Maia Ballis: Oh, if they can get away with it, yes.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Oh, yeah. They'll do anything. You see some of these
crazy movies about what the government would do and hey, they go and did it. One
of the great Presidents of our time, FDR, put 150,000 of us in concentration
camps just because our ancestors came from Japan. What sort of crap is that? And
we put up with it because we were afraid. We were afraid. Those, the yellow mobs
are going to, not mobs, bigger than mobs, are going to attack California. I mean
give me a break, but ->> Tom Holyoke: So what do you think the future holds?
>> George Elfie Ballis: What does it hold?
>> Tom Holyoke: What does the future hold?
>> Maia Ballis: What does the future hold?
>> George Elfie Ballis: What does the future hold? I have no idea.
>> Tom Holyoke: You're disillusioned with the Obama administration.
>> George Elfie Ballis: I have no idea. [ Laughter ] But I think, on of the -early on in my life, my father named me, I guess my mother named me George,
right, because in Greek families, the first boy is always George. And early on,
I regret after the war when I discovered what really went on, and they tell me
the big businessmen in the United States, Bush, Kennedy, Ford, helped create
Hitler. Oh, God, I'm glad I learned that.
>> Maia Ballis: It's not very encouraging. However ->> George Elfie Ballis: No, no, it is. It is encouraging. So what you have to
do, I was George and the warrior and then I realized later on 40-ish something
or other, that's not good to be a warrior, because you hurt yourself when you're
a warrior because you're, I kept saying I got to keep my anger up to do this
radical work.
>> Maia Ballis: That literally turns your stomach purple.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Right. It literally does, true. So I said, well, I
didn't do the purple stomach thing,
>> Maia Ballis: But you knew.
>> George Elfie Ballis: I said this doesn't feel right. So I became a dancer.
That's where Elfie came from and Elfie's a dancer, does the same thing, does the
work, but does it with joy. One thing that happened, once there was a hearing in
Fresno by the Department of Interior, and the large landowners brought in all
the workers from the West Side on tractors and everything. And they fed them
cheeseburgers at noon and the whole goddamned thing. And a lot of our friends,
supporters came from San Francisco and afterward they came to the farm, and they
said God, wasn't that horrible? Jesus, we were wiped out. I said look at it this
way. That's the biggest meeting we ever had.
>> Maia Ballis: So you find --

>> George Elfie Ballis: Huh?
>> Maia Ballis: You find the positive?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Well, and you live with joy because there's no other
option.
[ Laughter ]
>> Maia Ballis: Jump off the bridge, not an option.
>> George Elfie Ballis: For us, that's joy. That I can contact with all these
people with my camera and stick it in their face, they know that, they know that
I am one of them and they are one of me. So that's all you can do. And if, like
we say, we live in the cracks. So if a crack opens, you go through the crack,
and if it doesn't open, you dance anyway.
>> Maia Ballis: And basically you make where you are paradise. It's just, you
find the richness in your life and if you look outside, we're so blessed by
nature. It's a gorgeous place to live and we just, you know, it's a reason to
keep doing what we're doing. We keep exploring. He does with camera. I help. I
do with paint. We grow things. We enjoy each other for the moment and every day
is a gift. And then the larger picture, there's a lot of awful stuff going on
out there but there are some threads of hope so you keep pulling on the threads
of hope.
>> George Elfie Ballis: And when somebody's standing up against the crap they're
getting ->> Maia Ballis: You stand with them.
>> George Elfie Ballis: -- you support them. You support us, whether with our
camera or whatever. You can go to our website.
>> Tom Holyoke: Are people standing up right now?
>> George Elfie Ballis: Some are. Some are and some are getting co-opted.
>> Tom Holyoke: Anything else? [ Laughter ] Thank you.
>> George Elfie Ballis: Thank you.
==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====

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